Work

Input quality and speech perception development in bilingual infants’ first year of life

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: Individual differences in infants' native phonological development have been linked to the quantity and quality of infant-directed speech (IDS). The effects of parental and infant bilingualism on this relation in 131 five- and nine-month-old monolingual and bilingual Spanish and Basque infants (72 male; 59 female; from white middle-class background) were investigated. Bilingualism did not affect the developmental trajectory of infants' native and non-native speech perception and the quality of maternal speech. In both language groups, vowel exaggeration in IDS was significantly related to speech perception skills for 9-month-olds (r = -.30), but not for 5-month-olds. This demonstrates that bilingual and monolingual caregivers provide their infants with speech input that assists their task of learning the phonological inventory of one or two languages.

Source: Child Development

DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13686

Authors: Marina Kalashnikova, Manuel Carreiras

Institutions: Ikerbasque, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, University of the Basque Country

Language: English

Topic: Language Development and Disorders

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: Eusko Jaurlaritza, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Awards: Optimisation of the linguistic input in the first years of life, G4736287489, G506622032